There were two young men in Abbéville who were easily the cocks of the
woodland walk. Their eminence rested on the fact that they were the
strongest men in the parish. Strength is the thing that counts, when
people live on the edge of the wilderness. These two were well known all
through the country between Lake St. John and Chicoutimi as men of great
capacity. Either of them could shoulder a barrel of flour and walk off
with it as lightly as a common man would carry a side of bacon. There
was not a half-pound of difference between them in ability. But there
was a great difference in their looks and in their way of doing things.
[Illustration: "No, for what shall I fight with Raoul?"—Page 156.]
[Illustration: "But to fight—that is another affair."—Page 156.]
Raoul Vaillantcœur was the biggest and the handsomest man in the village;
nearly six feet tall, straight as a fir-tree, and black as a bull-moose
in December. He had natural force enough and to spare. Whatever he
did was done by sheer power of back and arm. He could send a canoe up
against the heaviest water, provided he did not get mad and break his
paddle—which he usually did. He had more muscle than he knew how to use.
Prosper Leclère did not have so much, but he knew better how to handle
it. He never broke his paddle—unless it happened to be a bad one, and
then he generally had another all ready in the canoe. He was at least
six inches shorter than Vaillantcœur; broad shoulders, long arms, light
hair, gray eyes; not a handsome fellow, but pleasant looking and very
quiet. What he did was done more than half with his head.
Leclère was the kind of a man that never needs more than one match to
light a fire.
But Vaillantcœur—well, if the wood was wet he might use a dozen, and
when the blaze was kindled, as like as not, he would throw in the rest
of the box.
Now, these two men had been friends and were rivals. At least that was
the way that one of them looked at it. And most of the people in the
parish seemed to think that was the right view.
It was a strange thing, and not altogether satisfactory to the public
mind, to have _two_ strongest men in the village. The question of
comparative standing in the community ought to be raised and settled in
the usual way. Raoul was perfectly willing, and at times (commonly on
Saturday nights) very eager. But Prosper was not.
"No," he said, one March night, when he was boiling maple-sap in the
sugar-bush with little Ovide Rossigno (who had a lyric passion for
holding the coat while another man was fighting)—"no, for what shall I
fight with Raoul? As boys we have played together. Once, in the rapids
of _la Belle Rivière_, when I have fallen in the water, I think he has
saved my life. He was stronger, then, than me. I am always a friend to
him. If I beats him now, am I stronger? No, but weaker. And if he beats
me, what is the sense of that? Certainly I shall not like it. What is
to gain?"
Down in the store of old Girard, that night, Vaillantcœur was holding
forth after a different fashion. He stood among the cracker-boxes and
flour-barrels, with a background of shelves laden with bright-colored
calicoes, and a line of tin pails hanging overhead, and stated his view
of the case with vigor. He even pulled off his coat and rolled up his
shirt-sleeve to show the knotty arguments with which he proposed to
clinch his opinion.
"That Leclère," said he, "that little Prosper Leclère! He thinks himself
one of the strongest—a fine fellow! But I tell you he is _lâche_. If he
is clever? Yes. But he is a poltroon. He knows well that I can flatten
him out like a _crêpe_ in the frying-pan. But he is afraid. He has not
as much courage as the musk-rat. You stamp on the bank. He dives. He
swims away. Bah!"
"How about that time he cut loose the jam of logs in the Rapide des
Cédres?" said old Girard from his corner.
Vaillantcœur's black eyes sparkled and he twirled his mustache fiercely.
"_Sa-prie!_" he cried, "that was nothing! Any man with an axe can cut
a log. But to fight—that is another affair. That demands the brave
heart. The strong man who will not fight is a coward. Some day I will
put him through the mill—you shall see what that small Leclère is made
of, _sacrédam!_"
Of course, affairs had not come to this pass all at once. It was a long
history, beginning with the time when the two boys had played together,
and Raoul was twice as strong as the other, and was very proud of it.
Prosper did not care; it was all right so long as they had a good time.
But then Prosper began to do things better and better. Raoul did not
understand it; he was jealous. Why should he not always be the leader?
He had more force. Why should Prosper get ahead? Why should he have
better luck at the fishing and the hunting and the farming? It was by
some trick. There was no justice in it.
Raoul was not afraid of anything but death; and whatever he wanted, he
thought he had a right to have. But he did not know very well how to get
it. He would start to chop a log just at the spot where there was a big
knot. He was the kind of a man that sets hare-snares on a caribou-trail,
and then curses his luck because he catches nothing.
[Illustration]
Besides, what ever he did, he was always thinking most about beating
somebody else. But Prosper cared most for doing the thing as well as
he could. If anyone else could beat him—well, what difference did it
make? He would do better the next time.
He looked the log over for a clear place before he began to chop. What
he wanted was, not to make the chips fly, but to get the fire started.
You are not to suppose that the one man was a saint and a hero, and the
other a fool and a ruffian. No; that sort of thing happens only in books.
People in Abbéville were not made on that plan. They were both plain
men. But there was a difference between them; and out of that difference
grew all the trouble.
It was hard on Vaillantcœur, of course, to see Leclère going ahead,
getting rich, clearing off the mortgage on his farm, laying up money
with the _notaire_ Bergeron, who acted as banker for the parish—it was
hard to look on at this, while he himself stood still, or even slipped
back a little, got into debt, had to sell a bit of the land that his
father left him. There must be some _chicane_ about it.
But this was not the hardest morsel to swallow. The great thing that
stuck in his crop was the idea that the little Prosper, whom he could have
whipped so easily, and whom he had protected so loftily, when they were
boys, now stood just as high as he did as a capable man—perhaps even
higher. Why was it that when the Pearce Brothers, down at Chicoutimi,
had a good "_jobbe-de-chantier_" up in the woods on _la Belle Rivière_,
they made Leclère the boss, instead of Vaillantcœur? Why did the _curé_
Villeneuve choose Prosper, and not Raoul, to steady the strain of the
biggest pole when they were setting up the derrick for the building of
the new church?
It was rough, rough! The more Raoul thought of it, the rougher it seemed.
The fact that it was a man who had once been his _protégé_, and still
insisted on being his best friend, did not make it any smoother. Would
you have liked it any better on that account? I am not telling you how it
ought to have been, I am telling you how it was. This isn't Vaillantcœur's
account-book; it's his story. You must strike your balances as you go
along.
[Illustration: "Why so many ifs in this fine speech?"—Page 160.]
And all the time, you understand, he felt sure in his heart that he was
stronger and braver than Prosper. He was hungry to prove it. He only knew
of one way. He grew more and more keen to try it. Two or three things
happened to set an edge on his hunger.
The first was the affair at the shanty on _Lac des Caps_. The
wood-choppers, like sailors, have a way of putting a new man through a
few tricks to initiate him into the camp. Leclère was bossing the job,
with a gang of ten men from St. Raymond under him. Vaillantcœur had just
driven a team in over the snow with a load of provisions, and was lounging
around the camp as if it belonged to him. It was Sunday afternoon, the
regular time for fun, but no one dared to take hold of him. He looked
too big. He expressed his opinion of the camp.
"No fun in this _chantier_, _hé_? I suppose that little Leclère he makes
you others work, and say your prayers, and then, for the rest you can
sleep. _Hé!_ Well, I am going to prepare a little fun for you, my boys.
Come, Prosper, get your hat, if you are able to climb a tree."
He snatched the hat from the table by the stove and ran out into the
snow. In front of the shanty a good-sized spruce, tall, smooth, very
straight, was still standing. He went up the trunk like a bear.
But there was a dead balsam that had fallen against the spruce and
lodged on the lower branches. It was barely strong enough to bear the
weight of a light man. Up this slanting ladder Prosper ran quickly in
his moccasined feet, snatched the hat from Raoul's teeth as he swarmed
up the trunk, and ran down again. As he neared the ground, the balsam,
shaken from its lodgement, cracked and fell. Raoul was left up the tree,
perched among the branches, out of breath. Luck had set the scene for
the lumberman's favorite trick.
"Chop him down! chop him down!" was the cry; and a trio of axes were
twanging against the spruce-tree, while the other men shouted and laughed
and pelted the tree with ice to keep the prisoner from climbing down.
[Illustration: They looked fine on Corpus Christi day.—Page 162.]
Prosper neither shouted nor chopped, but he grinned a little as he
watched the tree quiver and shake, and heard the rain of "_sacrés!_" and
"_maudits!_" that came out of the swaying top. He grinned—until he saw
that a half-dozen more blows would fell the spruce right on the roof of
the shanty.
"Are you fools?" he cried, as he picked up an axe; "you know nothing how
to chop. You kill a man. You smash the _cabane_. Let go!" He shoved one
of the boys away and sent a score of mighty cuts into the side of the
spruce that was farthest from the cabin; then two short cuts on the other
side; the tree shivered, staggered, cracked, and swept in a great arc
toward the deep snow-drift by the brook. As the top swung earth-ward,
Raoul jumped clear of the crashing branches and landed safely in the
featherbed of snow, buried up to his neck. Nothing was to be seen of
him but his head, like some new kind of fire-work—sputtering bad words.
Well, this was the first thing that put an edge on Vaillantcœur's hunger
to fight. No man likes to be chopped down by his friend, even if the
friend does it for the sake of saving him from being killed by a fall on
the shanty-roof. It is easy to forget that part of it. What you remember
is the grin.
The second thing that made it worse was the bad chance that both of
these men had to fall in love with the same girl. Of course there were
other girls in the village besides Marie Antoinette Girard—plenty of
them, and good girls, too. But somehow or other, when they _were beside
her_, neither Raoul nor Prosper cared to look at any of them, but only
at 'Toinette. Her eyes were so much darker and her cheeks so much more
red—bright as the berries of the mountain-ash in September. Her hair
hung down to her waist on Sunday in two long braids, brown and shiny
like a ripe hazel-nut; and her voice when she laughed made the sound of
water tumbling over little stones.
No one knew which of the two lovers she liked best. At school it was
certainly Raoul, because he was bigger and bolder. When she came back
from her year in the convent at Roberval it was certainly Prosper,
because he could talk better and had read more books. He had a volume
of _chansons_ full of love and romance, and knew most of them by heart.
But this did not last forever. 'Toinette's manners had been polished
at the convent, but her ideas were still those of her own people. She
never thought that knowledge of books could take the place of strength,
in the real battle of life. She was a brave girl, and she felt sure in
her heart that the man of the most courage must be the best man after all.
For awhile she appeared to persuade herself that it was Prosper, beyond
a doubt, and always took his part when the other girls laughed at him.
But this was not altogether a good sign. When a girl really loves, she
does not talk, she acts. The current of opinion and gossip in the village
was too strong for her. By the time of the affair of the "chopping-down"
at _Lac des Caps_, her heart was swinging to and fro like a pendulum.
One week she would walk home from mass with Raoul. The next week she
would loiter in the front yard on a Saturday evening and talk over the
gate with Prosper, until her father called her into the shop to wait on
customers.
It was in one of these talks that the pendulum seemed to make its last
swing and settle down to its resting-place. Prosper was telling her of
the good crop of sugar that he had just made from his maple grove.
"The profit will be large—more than forty piastres—and with that I
shall buy at Chicoutimi a new _quatre-roue_, of the finest, a veritable
wedding-carriage—if you—if I—'Toinette? Shall we ride together?"
[Illustration]
His left hand clasped hers as it lay on the gate. His right arm stole
over the low picket fence and went around the shoulder that leaned
against the gate-post. The road was quite empty, the night already dark.
He could feel her warm breath on his neck as she laughed.
"If you! If I! If what? Why so many ifs in this fine speech? Of whom
is the wedding for which this new carriage is to be bought? Do you know
what Raoul Vaillantcœur has said? 'No more wedding in this parish till
I have thrown the little Prosper over my shoulder!'"
As she said this, laughing, she turned closer to the fence and looked
up, so that a curl on her forehead brushed against his cheek.
[Illustration: He gripped Prosper by the head.—Page 165.]
"_Baptême!_ Who told you he said that?"
"I heard him, myself."
"Where?"
"In the store, two nights ago. But it was not for the first time. He
said it when we came from the church together, it will be four weeks
to-morrow."
"What did you say to him?"
"I told him perhaps he was mistaken. The next wedding might be after
the little Prosper had measured the road with the back of the longest
man in Abbéville."
The laugh had gone out of her voice now. She was speaking eagerly, and
her bosom rose and fell with quick breaths. But Prosper's right arm
had dropped from her shoulder, and his hand gripped the fence as he
straightened up.
"'Toinette!" he cried, "that was bravely said. And I could do it. Yes,
I know I could do it. But, _mon Dieu_, what shall I say? Three years
now, he has pushed me, everyone has pushed me, to fight. And you—but
I cannot. I am not capable of that."
[Illustration]
The girl's hand lay in his as cold and still as a stone. She was silent
for a moment, and then asked, coldly, "Why not, Monsieur Leclère?"
"Why not? Because of the old friendship. Because he pulled me out of
the river long ago. Because I am still his friend. Because now he hates
me too much. Because it would be a black fight. Because shame and evil
would come of it, whoever won. That is what I am afraid of, 'Toinette!"
Her hand slipped suddenly away from his. She stepped back from the gate.
"_Tiens!_ You have fear, Monsieur Leclère! Truly? I had not thought
of that. It is strange. For so strong a man it is a little stupid.
Good-night. I hear my father calling me. Perhaps some one in the store
who wants to be served. You must tell me again what you are going to do
with the new _quatre-roue_. Good-night!"
She was laughing again. But it was a different laughter. Prosper, at
the gate, did not think it sounded like the running of a brook over the
stones. No, it was more the noise of the dry branches that knock together
in the wind. He did not hear the sigh that came as she shut the door of
the house, nor see how slowly she walked through the passage into the
store.